Manhunt

The Bush Administration’s new strategy in the war against terrorism.

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ANNALS OF NATIONAL SECURITY about the ongoing hunt for members of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization by the U.S. government and the new policy of assassination promulgated by the Bush Administration... Tells about an American Predator reconnaissance aircraft in Yemen that was used to fire a missile at a car filled with Al Qaeda members... All of them were killed... The Hellfire was meant for Al Qaeda leader Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, but, Yemeni and American officials told reporters, the five passengers in the car had terrorist ties as well. Four of them belonged to the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army, an outlawed terrorist sect that had links to Al Qaeda, and the fifth had been identified as Kamal Derwish, an Arab-American who grew up near Buffalo and, according to the F.B.I., recruited American Muslims to attend Al Qaeda training camps... The al-Harethi operation also marked a dramatic escalation of the American war on terrorism. For more than a generation, state-endorsed assassination has been anathema in the United States... In internal Defense Department memos, Sec. Rumsfeld and the civilian officials close to him laid out the case for a new approach to the war on terrorism, one that would rely, in part, on the killing of selected individuals. The documents reflect their skepticism toward the generals and admirals who run the armed forces... At a press conference in September, one journalist noted the military’s growing involvement in police and intelligence activities inside Afghanistan, and asked Rumsfeld whether tracking down Al Qaeda was still the mission. "Well, a manhunt is certainly not what the armed forces of the United States are organized, trained, and equipped to do," Rumsfeld answered. "We may have to learn to do that, and we are indeed learning to do it." Paul Wolfowitz, in a discussion of future military operations during an interview with Bill Keller in the New York Times Magazine, in September, also noted obliquely that "maybe somewhere along the way we should have a volunteer force that is specifically volunteering for missions other than defending the country." Wolfowitz’s idea was characterized by Keller as "the opposite of the Peace Corps, you might say."... Quotes scholars on the legality of government-sponsored assassination... Mentions that military officials are less sanguine regarding the new policy... A Pentagon consultant said, "We’ve created a culture in the Special Forces-twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds who need adult leadership. They’re assuming you’ve got legal authority, and they’ll do it"-eagerly eliminate any target assigned to them. Eventually, the intelligence will be bad, he said, and innocent people will be killed. "And then they’ll get hung." As for Rumsfeld and his deputies, he said, "These guys will overextend themselves, and they’ll self-destruct." The military’s previous experience with assassination programs suggests some of the difficulties involved. Cites the Phoenix Program in Vietnam... Rumsfeld’s purpose in authorizing a high-value list of terrorists, one adviser said, is "obviously to go after the command structure of Al Qaeda." It was widely reported that Rumsfeld had set up an alternative intelligence-analysis shop under Douglas J. Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy. Part of Feith’s mission was to find evidence of a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. One recommendation to Rumsfeld called for restructuring Special Operations as a specific agency under the personal command of the Defense Secretary. In recent months, some of Rumsfeld’s most trusted aides have staged private meetings with past and present military and intelligence officials to discuss the expanding war on terrorism... "There are five hundred guys out there you have to kill," a former C.I.A. official said. "There’s no way to sugarcoat it-you just have to kill them. And you can’t always be one hundred per cent sure of the intelligence. Sometimes you have to settle for ninety-five per cent." Mentions a fresh terror attack in Yemen following the Predator/Hellfire missile assassination...